The Top 5 Research-Supported Tactics for Unlocking Solid Marketing Strategies

When a company’s bottom line is on the line, marketers can’t afford to just guess or go with their gut when devising their marketing strategies. It takes research to get results. Luckily, content marketing firm Fractl conducted numerous studies and surveys to discover the trends and tactics essential to achieving marketing goals in 2016. Inc.com shared the top takeaways revealed from all of this research.

1. Emotions That Take Campaigns Viral
Prompting an emotion can help turn a campaign into a viral phenomenon. Yet certain emotions determine content’s viral value. Research into these emotional triggers revealed:

The higher the emotional impact of a campaign, the higher the chance of it going viral.

Using an emotional contrast in a campaign boosted its emotional impact.

Admiration was an emotion very frequently found in highly shared content.

2. The Impression of Outbound vs. Inbound MarketingA constant conundrum for marketers is whether to use inbound or outbound marketing. An analysis of consumers’ interactions and engagement with both revealed the following findings:

Almost 90% of people used online search to uncover more information about a company.

80% visited a company’s website for more information.

93.2% used online search to get information about a company in the last week of being surveyed.

77% are more inclined to purchase a product or service after learning more about it via online search.

3. Native Advertising vs. Engagement, Reach, and ROI of Content MarketingThe impact of native advertising is a hot topic in marketing today. Research revealed how it’s currently being used and where it leads:

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48% of clients gauge content marketing success by the amount of leads, high-quality links, and social shares resulting from a campaign.

65% of agencies average from one to 10 native advertising campaigns every month for each client.

60% of agencies’ production is comprised of infographics.

30% of agencies’ production is made up of case studies, videos, and interactive graphics.

The average content marketing campaign generates 27 links, with the exclusion of outliers.

4. The Platforms and Publishers That Reign Supreme in Social MediaAfter analyzing 2.6 billion shares on five social platforms, the following social sources were found to dominate social media.

The platforms ranked as having the highest engagement were Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

81% of the total shares were generated on Facebook at the time of analysis.

The content that created the most positive sentiment was on Pinterest and LinkedIn.

An even number of positive and negative emotions was generated by content on Twitter and Google+.

The most negative emotions were found from content on Facebook.

More than 400 million total shares were generated by BuzzFeed.

88% of publishers earned fewer than 25 million shares for all of their top articles during the first six months of 2015.

The most-shared publishers on three different networks were Mashable, Forbes, and The New York Times.

Both BuzzFeed and CNN ranked among the top five publishers on two different networks.

5. How Social Sharing is Affected by Consumer IdentitiesThe content that consumers choose to share creates their online identities. The following findings reveal how their sharing habits were motivated by their personal identities.

68% of consumers posted on social media from one to seven times during the week they were surveyed.

42% shared that one to three of their posts were media or articles from third-party online publishers.

Social identity was at least somewhat important to 41% of men and 37% of women.

Millennials are more motivated by their imaginations, dreams, and goals than older audiences.